A phone call is a form of synchronous communication. Like other forms of synchronous communication, in order to establish the phone call, both the calling party and the called party must be available simultaneously to participate on the call. Further, both the calling party and the called party must be willing to participate. Unfortunately, when making a phone call, the calling party is unaware of whether the called party is actually available. Similarly, the called party has limited information about the call. For example, the called party has little to no information regarding the subject of the call or how long the call is likely to last.
For these reasons, many users attempt to manually plan or schedule phone calls. The planning process, however, is often time consuming and/or tedious. In many cases, users rely upon communication channels that are not synchronous, e.g., electronic mail, texting, and so forth, to coordinate the phone call. These other communication channels are completely separate from the phone call being coordinated and are not integrated into the phone call user experience.